ESzczesniak

DCS is much more run within the sim. There are additional maps, aircraft, and even a couple utilities (TacView) that are purchased through Eagle Dynamics and simple one click installed in DCS (nearly identical to MSFS Marketplace). There are external add ons, but these are much less fundamental to DCS than P3D. Beyond a voice control (VAICOM) and a couple mission planning/data cartridge type managers, nearly all the external mods I’ve seen are virtual fighter wing specific. The maps are made both by ED, and 3rd parties. But all within the sim. They have some varying quality. You get the Cacauses and Marianna’s maps for free. Most say Syria is the most detailed and Nevada the least. But honestly, it’s all pretty good straight up. In fact, I’m not sure I can think of any DCS add on that ups the visual quality. There are some legacy aircraft from “Flaming Cliffs 3” that are much lower fidelity. They look good, but very basic systems. These are easy to distinguish from the high fidelity planes. All the FC3 are about $10, where as the others are $40-80, but sometimes cheaper on sale. Of those, the quality is all very good. The Super Carrier package is a little bit of an exception. You get a free fully functional carrier out of the box. But the SC adds a better looking carrier with animated deck crew. It’s not required, but is very immersive…particularly the launch sequence. It is also still being developed, albeit very slowly. It has been said someday it’ll have briefing rooms, airboss station, etc. One other comment on the Tomcat is that it is much more hands on flying. I won’t say the F/A-18 doesn’t take some airmanship, but the actual flying is pretty straightforward…particularly outside “the groove” or tanking. I believe the Falcon is similar, although I’ve focused on the Hornet as well (I do own all three and several more). The Hornet FBW trims to 1 g (i.e. the nose stays where you left it) with gear up and AOA with the gear down. Whereas you’re going to have to actually fly the Tomcat. Spin recovery, thrust/pitch couple, manage cruise AOA, etc. I see this a largely a plus personally, but am more of an air to mud guy, hence the Hornet being my bird of choice.

All three aircraft modules are excellent. I think it comes down to style/preference. The F-14 is an older aircraft. It’s HUD is a bit more basic and the systems at heart are more simple. However “human interface” has evolved a lot, and interacting with them can be a bit less intuitive. The F-16 and F/A-18 are both rather modern…which is still a 12-15 year old avionics suite. Their capabilities are much broader and systems abilities more complex. But interacting with the systems is more intuitive. Some find the Hornet more “logical”, others the Falcon…and it depends a lot which system you’re talking about. For instance the HARM is much more intuitive in the Falcon. I think the big difference between those two comes down to your interest in carrier ops. Personally, I think just flying a case I marschall and recovery is amazing, much less the combat. At a simple level, the Warthog stick/throttle is enough to start. Not necessary, but nice would be rudder pedals. And VR really takes the experience to a whole other level. But of course that’s another bigger investment. VR really shines for formation flying, carrier patterns, aerial refueling, and dogfighting (the natural head tracking is really indispensable).

Thank you for the advice. I was a little less eager to pull the trigger this time. Other than my GPU, this build is 4-5 years old. That’s generally about the life span of my flight sim rig. But things are overall running pretty smooth at the moment. Wonder if the hardware cycle is relaxing a little bit for flight sims.

I have an 8700K overclocked modestly to 5.00 GHz on all cores. GPU is a RTX 3090, HDD's are NVMe drives. I think all the other hardware (MOBO, RAM) would be replaced if I upgraded, so probably not relevant. I am flying MSFS and DCS only now on a 4k TV. I have been pretty happy with performance, but do reach some stutters. I have not done any formal measures of FPS. If money is not an object (it always is, but assuming), is it worth it to get a new CPU, MOBO, and/or RAM? I think I would be looking at the 11900K, 12700K, or 12900K. Outwardly the 11900K has a high out of the box clock and is cheaper, but in general would expect the 12900K to be a little more future proof as the flagship current gen. I appreciate any thoughts! Eric

The A320 trims to 1 g I believe automatically. I want to say it’s referred to as C* law. Technically, I think that is supposed to blend g-load and pitch rate/stick deflection. So it ends up at 1 g with hands off the stick, or largely the nose stays pointed where you left it. Thats all done by the FCC’s and under normal control law, trim doesn’t really change anything. The 777, and I think the 787, trim to an airspeed. Which I think is C*U law. This is supposed to blend a feedback if you’re over or under trimmed airspeed. So if you “trim down” on airspeed, you would get a feedback to pitch up on the yoke and bleed speed.

This post is definitely my personal feelings and musing, but sometimes it's nice to share our experiences to discuss with others. Since MSFS came out, I've run P3D and MSFS side by side. Today, that ended and P3D is departing my system. The final straw was trying to start P3D today and it is now crashing starting a flight. Life is busy and I hadn't started P3D in 2-3 months (have done some short flying in DCS and MSFS). It did it's moody thing and wouldn't load in to flight. It seems it would do this every 6 or so months and I'd end up reinstalling everything. With some 150 add-ons to install, it was a several day task. I have been a little particular purchasing nearly every MSFS addon through either the marketplace or Orbx Central. This makes reinstalling basically a 2 click process. I have the FBW and WT aircraft, but that's in the the community folder. P3D seemed to have too much meddling in the background. Of the time I've spent with sims, I've spend so much more time actually flying with MSFS compared to P3D. Today was the lightbulb that made me realize that. I don't have everything I did in P3D. Very high level airliners are still missing, and most notably missing for me are the peripherals. I had a CDU and MCP for 737NG's. I expect these will eventually come to MSFS, but they're not there yet. ATC, AI, and weather get knocked pretty frequently, but I don't find them to be that far off from vanilla P3D. Sorry for the rambling musings, but it was time to share. It feels almost as if a load has been lifted not trying to maintain P3D anymore. Realizing how nearly all of my time in MSFS has been flying instead of tweaking/troubleshooting was the final nail in the coffin.

I don't know what you think is "right", but what I have is no where near realistic in gusty conditions. With that said, I am pretty sure from comments I've seen, different people are seeing different things. I don't know if it's some setting, hardware, FPS issue, etc. But there seem to be some fairly direct comparisons that vary fomr a barely controllable aircraft to steady crosswinds with steady aircraft in the same setups. On my end, steady winds are fine, but there is no flying a stable approach in gust/high wind conditions. I will try to post a video when I can sit down and record one. While I understand what you're saying about "it's supposed to be a challenge", this isn't even remotely realistic. I posted scores of 1.5 million plus on every single landing challenge until SU6, so it's not that I'm incapable of flying the approaches. Now on challenges like Dusseldorf, I can only put the aircraft on the runway in a completely unreaslistic unstable approach. I have to aim half way down the runway so that when a gust or windshear hits on short final, I'm not dropped to the ground short of the runway. Personally, I don't care if people call it "nerfed" or whatever, I want realistic. And winds that can bank a 747 20 degrees, add or subtract 60 kts almost instantly, or pop a Cessna to a new heading 25 degrees away may be realistic in extreme weather, but complete unrealistic that any aircraft would be flying. The ATIS for the particular Dusseldorf landing challenge doesn't even report gusts, it reports winds 230 at 25 kts.

Yes, but this is a "landing challenge". I would expect one could land. And my experience is completely different than YouTube recordings.

Again, we were seeing different things. I would see gusts with turbulence and airspeed changes, but in a 15-20 kt range that is controllable. These also had much smaller and shorter effects on vertical speed, leaving this manageable.

I can't help but think we are seeing different effects here. Nearly instantaneous changes of 60 kts is beyond safe to land in a 747. I can't speak to how realistic it may feel not having any seat time in a heavy aircraft. But I cam sure it is beyond any safety limitation. On the gauges it looks like heavy windshear. I was pretty happy with where the wind was prior to SU6.

I am finding in "windy conditions" that I am having horribly aggressive wind effects on the aircraft. Objectively, while flying the "windy" landing challenges, at Dusseldorf the 747's airspeed jumps about 60 kts (from Vref of 140, to about 200) and flying C172 in the Sedona challenge, the heading bounces 25 degrees on the compass, both over the course of about a second. The 747 in particular will go form a 1500 fpm descent to a 500 fpm climb over 2-3 seconds. While the opening brief weather report doesn't report gusts, both scenarios are quartering head winds, about 35 kts for the 747 and 20 kts for the C172. I am not sure what version YouTubers were running, but when I look up YouTube videos of these challenges, I do not see the same behavior. I hadn't flown either of these scenarios prior to SU6, but went back to Gibraltar and the A320 behaved much different too. Here I got about 20 kts jumps with similar aggressive heading and and vertical speed changes. Previously, the expected crab and throttle/pitch changes were needed, but could be kept up with. This feels similar to the RTM release to me, but this settled down in one of the early updates until just recently. I have found posts noting the legacy flight model can see this, but my settings confirm I have the modern selected. Does anyone else have any input or thoughts on this matter?

Orbx may redo their PAKT, but the Northern Sky Studio is far more detailed than the current Orbx offering. MSFS graphics help, but it's more than that alone.

That's not the way it works. When providing information to any regulatory authority such as the FAA, veracity is above all else. Allegiance to your employer is secondary. That's why the various whistleblower laws and protections have been put in place. His only defense would be that he provided information he thought to be true, i.e. Boeing fooled him too. He blew this by bragging about how easy it was to fool the authorities. Yes, it's unfair Boeing had the money to "bribe" a settlement. But that has no bearing on guilt of Boeing, or this gentlemen (assuming claims to be true). And it's far more unfair that people boarded an aircraft they trusted to be safe and lost their lives. Accidents happen, this sounds more than just an accident. I'm a huge fan of Boeing aircraft (other than the MCAS fiasco), but honestly I'm not sure I can convince myself they should be allowed to continue to remain open...again assuming the allegation of coverups at Boeing to be true.

Would love to see the pipeline open more to new PC marketplace additions. Seems like they're spending so much time catching up Xbox, there's not much happening for PC in the marketplace. I kind of get that, but am eager to see more new stuff for PC.

It will show up as a USB windows controller. So the control functions can be assigned in P3D directly, or better yet with FSUIPC. The one thing that doesn't work as plug-n-play are the warning and landing gear lights. These either need the Honeycomb software from their site, or fancy footwork with FSUIPC, AAO, etc.

Our family has a job that oddly relies on outdated faxing for a number of forms. This is a remote job done mostly from home, so we're using equipment at home. We have a copier/fax/scanner/printer in our home office, but no phone jack. We have a fairly new house and it only has 2 jacks in the house, one in a kitchen, and one downstairs. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to easily add a phone jack so we could use the printer we have? Or as an alternative, any suggestions for faxing from home?

I'm having some troubles loading a flight into/around Sydney. I have Orbx Cityscape Sydney purchased and installed through the marketplace. As it's several gigabytes in size, I was hoping to see a way to disable an add-on without deleting all the local files. I am not seeing a way to do this, am I missing something?

Also, CDU, MCP/EFIS, and Stream Deck.

From what I've seen both AAO and spad.Next can do this, although I think the gauges can be a bit more complex in spad.Next.

I have installed that plugin already. It looks by far the easiest, but if I'm reading things correctly it only interfaces with default sim functions. So things from FBW, the Aerosoft CRJ, PMDG, and others as they come out, won't access the aircraft specific stuff...unless I'm reading things wrong.

I picked up a Stream Deck XL with the primary intent to augment my DCS pit with UFC's for various aircraft. However, seems it would be foolish to not use it with MSFS as well. I see both spad.Next and Lorby AAO's will bridge between MSFS and Stream Deck. Any commentary for advantages and disadvantages to either? I have Lorby AAO, but never got very in to it, mostly not finding it completely intuitive. I got it to interface the Honeycomb yoke and throttle with the Aerosoft CRJ, which has sat in the hangar (rave early reviews caught me, didn't really live up to expectations compared to FBW and WT). Spad.Next seems even less intuitive, but I've seen it works with the Virtual Avionics MCP and EFIS, which I have for P3D and would love to use once the NG3 is out for MSFS. I'm sure there I'll hear "use what you have", but I'm trying to get started on the ground floor with the one that will serve me the best before investing time to learn one fully.

While technically correct, the energy dissipation from a hard touch down is negligible when it comes to slowing an aircraft in the forward direction. Little of the energy from the y axis translates to the x axis. The larger reason for the high descent rates on a carrier trap come from safety and reproducibility. Hitting a small touchdown area is much more reliable from a stable flight attitude than hitting that same point during a transiting attitude. You also spend more time in ground effect with a flare, as if the carriers burble wasn’t enough to deal with for variability. As for safety, and assuming an identical touchdown point, a flare adds a segment of a shallower descent. This effectively lowers your “threshold” height compared to a standard approach to the same touchdown point at a fixed glide slope angle. In this case, the threshold is clearance at the ramp. And you want that to be healthy to avoid ramp strikes. In fact, to maintain ramp clearance in high wind over the deck scenarios, the IFOLS glide path angle is increased. Higher headwinds slow the ground speed on approach, which with a moving runway means a long travel over the group for the same height…effectively making a more shallow approach angle. And if that isn’t enough, the IFOLS heigh is adjusted per aircraft to maintain a safe ramp clearance. Each aircraft has set hook/eye distance. It’s the vertical distance from the pilots eyes to the hook at landing AOA. It only varies by a few feet from each aircraft, but the importance of ramp clearance is such that this too is adjusted. There’s a lot of work that goes in to making sure the tail hook (which is the lowest part of the aircraft) crosses the ramp at the same heigh every time. If I recall the number correctly, it’s 13.1’ from the ramp to the hook on a perfect approach.

Technically, there are a lot of variables. You don't know the takeoff weights and thrust derates used in the video. So a heavily loaded aircraft on a long runway with an aggressive (but safe) derate may take 2-3x the time as a lightly loaded aircraft with full rated thrust. You wouldn't typically fly the latter in commercial revenue flights, but it's the situation we get a lot in the sim. With that said, yes I think there are issues. I have flown primarily the CRJ and FBW A320. If flown by the numbers, they seem stuck to the runway for a little bit after Vr, then pitch quickly at breakaway, leading to poor first segment climb. I had broached this after the CRJ release, as this aircraft seemed particularly affected. There seemed to be some consensus that a good flight model could really help, but there were also some sim issues. I've seen some finger pointing to ground effect, but I'm not sure that alone explains these issues. I am also unsure if GA is affected, as I have made very few flights in GA.

A lot of engineers are brilliant academically, but clueless to the context in which their design will be used. From time to time you get a team that either “gets it” a or gets enough feedback and they make legends. Often that actually means simpler systems engineering, but better “human factors” engineering. The funny thing is, when this happens, the name of their inventions live on forever, but the engineers who designed them fall to obscurity.

I’m not sure about the 737 from them. I’ve had an old FDS unit. I was thinking the Skalarki would have similar issues since it still has an HDMI input. But maybe FSLABs interfacing has allowed more options. With FDS, you have to undock the CDU screen and move it over to the CDU monitor. It’s not horrible, but kind of annoying as well. This really is a first world problem, but I’d love the idea of not having it register as another monitor. Windows multiple monitor management is annoying, and even more so if you have a WMR VR headset that creates multiple new displays.